On proposal of the Universities, the Francqui Foundation attributes each year some Francqui Chairs. 

For academic year 2024-2025, the Faculty of Applied Engineering awarded a Francqui Chair. This honor went to prof. dr. ir. JBram Vanderborght. Promotor for this Chair is prof. dr. Steve Vanlanduit.

The Faculty is pleased to organize the inaugural lecture on 29 April 2025.

Bram Vanderborght

During my PhD I performed research on adaptable compliance of pneumatic artificial muscles in the dynamically balanced biped Lucy and extended my expertise on Dynamic stepping over large obstacles by the humanoid robots through a research stay at the Joint Japanese/French Robotics Laboratory (JRL) in AIST, Tsukuba (Japan). Then as a post-doc at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genova (Italy) I focused on the humanoid robot iCub and compliant actuation. In October 2009, I became professor at the VUB and from 2011 to 2016, also research director at the Universitatea Babes-Bolyai and oriented my research toward robot assisted therapy with ASD children. Then in 2014 also developed radically new solutions to improve actuators during the execution of my ERC Starting Grant on Series-Parallel Elastic Actuation for Robotics. From 2014 to 2019, as core lab manager of Flanders Make in Flexible Assembly I coordinated the AugmentX proposal to make a 1M€ testlab on human augmentation technologies for research institutes and companies to experimentally validate ergonomics using motion capture, force plates and physiological measurement equipment, and then became affiliated to the IMEC, as scientific collaborator. I am currently leading the 150-person Brubotics research institute, one of the only truly interdisciplinary robotics research centers in Europe combining expertise on robotics, AI, rehabilitation sciences, movement sciences, social sciences, retail marketing, ageing and eHealth. I also co-lead the Homo Roboticus project on how to keep the human values central in a robotised world.